Processing prefixes and suffixes in handwriting production

Previous research showed that handwriting production is mediated by linguistically oriented processing units such as syllables and graphemes. The goal of this study was to investigate whether French adults also activate another kind of unit that is more related to semantics than phonology, namely morphemes. Experiment 1 revealed that letter duration and inter-letter intervals were longer for suffixed words than for pseudo-suffixed words. These results suggest that the handwriting production system chunks the letter components of the root and suffix into morpheme-sized units. Experiment 2 compared the production of prefixed and pseudo-prefixed words. The results did not yield significant differences. This asymmetry between suffix and prefix processing has also been observed in other linguistic tasks. In suffixed words, the suffix would be processed on-line during the production of the root, in an analytic fashion. Prefixed words, in contrast, seem to be processed without decomposition, as pseudo-affixed words.     

Representing time in language and memory: The role of similarity structure

Every day we read about or watch events in the world and can easily understand or remember how long they last. What aspects of an event are retained in memory? And how do we extract temporal information from our memory representations? These issues are central to human cognition, as they underlie a fundamental aspect of our mental life, namely our representation of time. This paper reviews previous language studies and reports a visual learning study indicating that properties of the events encoded in memory shape the representation of their duration. The evidence indicates that for a given event, the extent to which its associated properties or sub-components differ from one another modulates our representation of its duration. These properties include the similarity between sub-events and the similarity between the situational contexts in which an event occurs. We suggest that the diversity of representations that we associate with events in memory plays an important role in remembering and estimating the duration of experienced or described events.     

Affect, unconscious and sensemaking. A psychodynamic, semiotic and dialogic model

The work presents a psychodynamic, semiotic and dialogical model of affect and of the role it plays in sensemaking. The model is based on the following three general assumptions.A) Affective semiosis works in accordance to the dynamic unconscious which Freud conceptualized in terms of primary process. According to this interpretation, the unconscious is the mind’s homogenising way of functioning, which transforms every categorical relation into a relation of identity. B) Affect is the generalized, homogenising and absolutizing embodied basic intersubjective meanings according to which experience is interpreted. C) Affective semiosis performs both the grounding and regulative functions in sensemaking, orienting the way people interpret experience.     

Reading action word affects the visual perception of biological motion

In the present study, we investigate whether reading an action-word can influence subsequent visual perception of biological motion. The participant's task was to perceptually judge whether a human action identifiable in the biological motion of a point-light display embedded in a high density mask was present or not in the visual sequence, which lasted for 633 ms on average. Prior to the judgement task, participants were exposed to an abstract verb or an action verb for 500 ms, which was related to the human action according to a congruent or incongruent semantic relation. Data analysis showed that correct judgements were not affected by action verbs, whereas a facilitation effect on response time (49 ms on average) was observed when a congruent action verb primed the judgement of biological movements. In relation with the existing literature, this finding suggests that the perception, the planning and the linguistic coding of motor action are subtended by common motor representations.     

Does bilingualism hamper lexical access in speech production?

In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that bilingualism may cause a linguistic disadvantage in lexical access even for bilinguals' first and dominant language. To this purpose, we conducted a picture naming experiment comparing the performance of monolinguals and highly-proficient, L1-dominant bilinguals. The results revealed that monolinguals name pictures faster than bilinguals, both when bilinguals perform picture naming in their first and dominant language and when they do so in their weaker second language. This is the first time it has been demonstrated that bilinguals show a naming disadvantage in their L1 in comparison to monolingual speakers.     

Different mechanisms for role relations versus verb–action congruence effects: Evidence from ERPs in picture–sentence verification

Extant accounts of visually situated language processing do make general predictions about visual context effects on incremental sentence comprehension; these, however, are not sufficiently detailed to accommodate potentially different visual context effects (such as a scene–sentence mismatch based on actions versus thematic role relations, e.g., (Altmann & Kamide, 2007; Knoeferle & Crocker, 2007; Taylor & Zwaan, 2008; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998)). To provide additional data for theory testing and development, we collected event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as participants read a subject–verb–object sentence (500 ms SOA in Experiment 1 and 300 ms SOA in Experiment 2), and post-sentence verification times indicating whether or not the verb and/or the thematic role relations matched a preceding picture (depicting two participants engaged in an action). Though incrementally processed, these two types of mismatch yielded different ERP effects. Role–relation mismatch effects emerged at the subject noun as anterior negativities to the mismatching noun, preceding action mismatch effects manifest as centro-parietal N400s greater to the mismatching verb, regardless of SOAs. These two types of mismatch manipulations also yielded different effects post-verbally, correlated differently with a participant's mean accuracy, verbal working memory and visual-spatial scores, and differed in their interactions with SOA. Taken together these results clearly implicate more than a single mismatch mechanism for extant accounts of picture–sentence processing to accommodate.     

Norms of age of acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words

Word processing studies increasingly make use of regression analyses based on large numbers of stimuli (the so-called megastudy approach) rather than experimental designs based on small factorial designs. This requires the availability of word features for many words. Following similar studies in English, we present and validate ratings of age of acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words. These include nearly all lemmas language researchers are likely to be interested in. The ratings are freely available for research purposes.     

When language gets emotional: Irony and the embodiment of affect in discourse

Although there is increasing evidence to suggest that language is grounded in perception and action, the relationship between language and emotion is less well understood. We investigate the grounding of language in emotion using a novel approach that examines the relationship between the comprehension of a written discourse and the performance of affect-related motor actions (hand movements towards and away from the body). Results indicate that positively and negatively valenced words presented in context influence motor responses (Experiment 1), whilst valenced words presented in isolation do not (Experiment 3). Furthermore, whether discourse context indicates that an utterance should be interpreted literally or ironically can influence motor responding, suggesting that the grounding of language in emotional states can be influenced by discourse-level factors (Experiment 2). In addition, the finding of affect-related motor responses to certain forms of ironic language, but not to non-ironic control sentences, suggests that phrasing a message ironically may influence the emotional response that is elicited.     

What's up? Emotion-specific activation of vertical space during language processing

The relationship between language processing and vertical space has been shown for various groups of words including valence words, implicit location words, and words referring to religious concepts. However, it remains unclear whether these are single phenomena or whether there is an underlying common mechanism. Here, we show that the evaluation of word valence interacts with motor responses in the vertical dimension, with positive (negative) evaluations facilitating upward (downward) responses. When valence evaluation was not required, implicit location words (e.g., bird, shoe) influenced motor responses whereas valence words (e.g., kiss, hate) did not. Importantly, a subset of specific emotional valence words that are commonly associated with particular bodily postures (e.g., proud → upright; sad → slouched) did automatically influence motor responses. Together, this suggests that while the vertical spatial dimension is not directly activated by word valence, it is activated when processing words referring to emotional states with stereotypical bodily-postures. These results provide strong evidence that the activation of spatial associations during language processing is experience-specific in nature and cannot be explained with reference to a general mapping between all valence words and space (i.e., all positive and negative words generally relate to spatial processing). These findings support the experiential view of language comprehension, suggesting that the automatic reactivation of bodily experiences is limited to word groups referring to emotions or entities directly associated with spatial experiences (e.g., posture or location in the world).     

Anticipatory baseline effects and information integration in visual world studies

Researchers often conduct visual world studies to investigate how listeners integrate linguistic information with prior context. Such studies are likely to generate anticipatory baseline effects (ABEs), differences in listeners' expectations about what a speaker might mention that exist before a critical speech stimulus is presented. ABEs show that listeners have attended to and accessed prior contextual information in time to influence the processing of the critical speech stimulus. However, further evidence is required to show that the information actually did influence subsequent processing. ABEs can compromise the validity of inferences about information integration if they are not appropriately controlled. We discuss four solutions: statistical estimation, experimental control, elimination of “on-target” trials, and neutral gaze. An experiment compares the performance of these solutions, and suggests that the elimination of on-target trials introduces bias in the direction of ABEs, due to the statistical phenomenon of regression toward the mean. We conclude that statistical estimation, possibly coupled with experimental control, offers the most valid and least biased solution.